As Internet technologies continuously become mature and hardware is developed toward miniaturization, large quantities of smart wearable devices (for example, smart watches, glasses, and bands) emerge. These wearable devices may be worn by people, and connected to mobile terminals having high intelligence (for example, smartphones and tablet computers) to form a personal area network centered on an individual person's workspace. In the personal area network, generally, a star topology (as shown in FIG. 1) is used. As shown in FIG. 1, a mobile terminal is used as a master device, and wearable devices (designated as wearable device A, wearable device B, wearable device C, wearable device D, and wearable device E) are used as slave devices. All the slave devices connect to the master device in BLUETOOTH low energy (BLE) mode, and set a time division multiplexing communication mode to transmit data in receive or transmit timeslots allocated by the master device (as shown in FIG. 2).
Featuring a simple structure, the conventional star topology of the personal area network is easy to maintain. However, because various wearable devices in the personal area network must establish connections to the mobile terminal, the network topology is fixed, and this is disadvantageous for data transmission in the personal area network in some cases and even causes network overheads to increase. For example, when a quantity of wearable devices connected to the mobile terminal is large, some urgent messages of certain wearable devices cannot be sent to the mobile terminal in time. For another example, when a wearable device B needs to send data to a wearable device A, the wearable device B must first send the data to the mobile terminal, and then the mobile terminal forwards the data to the wearable device A, causing the network overheads to increase. Therefore, to facilitate data transmission in the personal area network or reduce the network overheads, an appropriate adjustment of the network topology of the entire personal area network is quite necessary.